30 day sprint

A 30 day sprint is a short burst of work lasting at most a month (see 14 day sprint for a shorter cycle appropriate to media-driven work like advertising and elections and other campaigns). An executable and other deliverables are built by a "cross functional team consisting of no more than 9 members" working towards a very specific goal. According to the most active promoters of the 30-day schedule, basic to the scrum methods, the rules are:

"An executable demonstrating the goal will be completed by the team during the sprint."

"The sprint team has final say in estimating and determining what they can accomplish during the sprint."

14 day sprint if there is a chance of surprise "ideas" or "requirements" emerging between the start and the end.

"If external forces determine that the sprint is working on the wrong thing, a sprint can be halted and restarted with new backlog and purpose." This may be a good argument for starting multiple sprints in parallel, especially if one is using cheap outsourced coder talent.

90 day sprint

The 90 day sprint is the longest development cycle usually recommended for complex systems including software. It is appropriate for the core technology of a startup company, proof of concept in a corporate joint venture, or very complex integration projects (like a Consumerium pilot).

cheap outsourced coder

Many people think that the cheap outsourced coder living in Russia, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, or other places with many well educated programmers are a threat to their jobs (often charging as little as US$10/day).

They are not afraid of ugly grunt work like writing a nasty device driver.

They could be chosen from people who support fair trade or ecology causes already, and so would have strong ideology reasons to do a good job. However, free software geeks very often have strong ideology reasons to make it hard to work with non-free software, which is not that important to Consumerium, which will no doubt have to work with lots of strange stuff to make it work.

They are so cheap, donations from rich developed-world programmers doing a few hours a week of work could pay for a week of their time, and that would make the rich developed-world programmers "managers" at least for this one project. Probably it helps everyone's career.

When it is hard to explain a concept to them, they can be sent to read about it in the Wikipedia, and when stupid people there censor them and say "you are trolls", that will be a couple more smart programmers angry at Wikipedia and ready to help destroy it with massive denial of service attack.